Link: VMware Communities: ESX 3.5U2 Patch experiences? .... Dear VMware Customers, In addition to the express patch and the re-issued ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 release, we now have an alternative installation process for customers who haven't applied either to hosts...

After a lot of deliberating this, I decided to put online an album with a lot of the pictures I took at Akademy. Since most people at (big) conferences and community gatherings like it when they can have some form of memento (including me!) of themselves and the event, I think this outweighs the (very few) people who didn't seem to like their picture being taken. Especially since most of the people actually tried posing in different positions when I came near them with my camera, which I think means obviously that they would want to see themselves afterwards

To the best of my abilities of remembering those who did not like pictures being taken, I have not put online the pictures of those people, neither have I uploaded the pictures of somewhat embarrassing nature (like people sleeping during the presentations ). I've also not uploaded the worst out-of-focus ones, blurry ones, moved ones, etc. This brings me to a total of 685 pictures currently ...read more...

Some might have heard already how Kenny and /me got involved in a car accident yesterday...

The story is rather simple: we arrived in Amersfoort (where I live), and after dropping of Jos van den Ooever at the trainstation I wanted to show Kenny a bit of the center of the city. Now the center isn't very car-friendly, but we managed to find a little street which did show some promise. So we went in there - and suddenly full stop... We were out for a few seconds, then came by, saw flames coming out the front of the car. I had an airbag in my face, and generally felt like shit.

After we got out of the burning car and the police & firebrigade came, we figured we apparently went into a street which was 'guarded' by a rising bollard. And that thing decided to come up and look around just when we drove over it. It threw the car a couple of metres to the side, totally destroying the engine block. Actually that ...read more...

Recently I bought a new keyboard and wondered if I can trigger actions via udev when the keyboard is plugged in. For that, however, it must be known how to create udev rules matching the keyboard in the first place.

To write udev rules the most important part is to match the device you want to handle with the rules. While hardware fixed in the computer might be easy, the rest usually isn’t. For example, you can trigger something when keyboard xyz of manufacturer abc is plugged in - but for that you must now where to find which information and how to present them to udev.

This can be done with the program udevmonitor. It informs you of newly plugged in hardware detected by udev:

I have had an idea way back about improved documentation for KDE which I'd like to share since Harald has pointed out the miserable state of documentation in KDE. I know that ideas are only worth one cent or so compared to the implementation, but still I think it would be really helpful:

My idea is to use an english Wiki for documenation. This might not be new, but what I mean is to actually integrate the internal help with an online Wiki. That way users can and would write the documenation themselves. This would have two advantages: a) the documentation would be most likely better than what it is now (this is not hard to achieve...) and b) it is a much easier way to start to contribute to KDE than specific translation or bug hunting stuff. Just link from the doc page to the online Wiki for updodate docs and there propose to fix it if it is outdated, wrong or missing. Then pull the Wiki content before string freeze from the database, add screenshot media as ...read more...

Link: VMware Communities: Developer Center Blog: Easy Money – PowerShell Scripting Contests submissions end in just two short weeks... Folks, Not that you need to be reminded but just in case some of you forgot – our PowerShell Scripting contest...

maemo sdk seems to come with a cdbs, debhelper and dpkg-dev too old to make it easy to build several debian unstable packages like kde4. maemo seems to come with glibc2.5 and debian/armel kde4 packages depends on 2.7 or greater. trying to build a newer dpkg in maemo environment requires several perl modules not available - and when buildling those, a circular build dependency is quickly reached.

So, it is done, fini and almost over. I’m sitting here in the cantine/aula of the Nayer institute where at max 20 people are drinking cola to get some last hacking work done before they are about to leave back home. While some of the spanish speaking hackers are playing ‘ping pong’ (not sure if it is called ping-pong) I can safely say that the amount of people dropped down from ~300 to max. 100 at the whole campus site.

This is my first Akademy experience and so far it has been a great and seriously fantastic experience. Outside of Akademy I’m involved in the organization of a other project and have been involved in some projects in the past. Since the roots of the initial organizers, Bart & Wendy, is very (with that I mean, VERY ) Belgium they’ve chosen there very romantic, sweet and beautiful hometown of Mechelen as the location of the event.

From a very early start on, Bart and Wendy tried to contact lots of people and sponsors ...read more...

The general day 1 article described the atmosphere and two Keynotes. The first keynote was about increasing community involvement, and the refreshing ideas in there really set the tone for Akademy: innovation ...

I went to my first Akademy this year. And I get the strong feeling that I should have kept my mouth shut a lot of work is ahead of me.

As you might have noticed there is a promo team. And we do work, too. We came up with some nice and hopefully helpful ideas during our BoFs. There will be a complete new system to help everybody on organizing events which is already under development and we agreed on using common web2.0 platforms to raise attention among new user groups. Stay tuned for news on this topic.

Personally, I learnt a lot although I had to work over the weekend and therefor couldn’t hear a single talk. I enjoyed meeting people face to face I only knew the names of and get to know new ones, talk about ideas and turn them into plans. We’ll see which ones will finally become reality…

And if you want to read more inspired blog entries than this, head over to Wade Olson…

The innovation BOF went both worse and better than I expected. I was mostly screwing up - being way to theoretical, non-specific. But the audience was great, they came up with some very useful ideas, which I'll go through in a minute.

But first about the questionare I've blogged about and which I would like the KDE contributors to fill in. It measures things which according to lots of scientific articles are important for innovation. This is mostly kind'a vague, think about concepts like 'formalization' which measures the extend to which the organization uses formal structure & rules to get things done or keep ppl in line. The idea is to see if there are area's KDE is doing bad in, and then figure out what we can do to improve. The full questionare takes approx. 30 min in dutch, and I've removed a bunch of questions, but I can't promise it'll take you less than 30 minutes. It has been translated, and most of you take it in another than your native language, which ...read more...

So I spent a couple of hours tonight hacking on KPilot instead of going to bed like a smart little boy (sorry, honey!!! =:( ), and I fixed a couple of nagging problems that’ve been bugging me for months that I’ve just not been able to find the time to dig in and investigate. I think that’s the problem. At this stage in my life, there simply is no time unless it is forcibly wrenched away from my family or sleep. Blef.

Anyway, I digress…

As this year’s Google Summer of Code winds down to an abrupt end (Pencils down on Monday?? Already??), I am once again very satisfied and impressed with the job that Bertjan has done. He’s continued last year’s outstanding job with our base synchronization conduit and made it even better. He’s finally brought category synchronization into KPilot (how have people not been complaining about this??), thanks to our outstanding base conduit foundation. And he’s ported the ToDo, Contacts, and Calendar conduits to the new Akonadi back end! Woot! I just tried syncing contacts and calendar changes ...read more...

Dipesh, I think I'm gonna sincerely hate you... You know I don't like blogging, I already told you, and despite of this you send blog posts that I have to answer if I don't want to look impolite...That's a dishonest way of doing things, a treachery.

So, I won't make the whole history of the page master thing, it has already been described by dipesh, in commits, on koffice mailing list and so on... Doesn't really matter.The changes we made in the branch have been reviewed by Thomas Zander on Monday, I spent a lot of time to fix every problem reported (mainly unit tests needing upgrades), and also improving the changes, Sebastian did the UI changes. The branch has been merged into trunk today, so it's done : KWord does support page styles.

Else, I started looking at the other KWord problems (not ODF specific). There are a lot of cool things to fix, like for instance cursor blinking (too late, it's done), table support (too late, you're doomed if you try this), working support ...read more...

This is possibly one of the most widely used and most simple method to adjust an image. It's so simple and effective that you will want to use it on all your pictures from now on, so keep an eye on this, and have fun.

Lets see this sample photo from Akademy 2008, kindly donated by Sebastian K

I have just recently (2 years ago) finished to read The Lord Of The Rings. It was a huge task (I read the whole 6 books + history + languages + ̷ specially since I read the English version. So, now I have to move to the next challenge, and it seems the Dune books are a good idea.

Only this time, people suggested I read the Hebrew translation and not the native English version. It seems the pseudo Arabic using in the books(1)gets translated really well from English to Hebrew. And really, the books felt to me like they were written in Hebrew and not translated to Hebrew (even tough the 3rd and 4th books are a mess, as they contain bad translations and printing errors (2)). I assume it felt more natural for me then reading the English version.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi35_systems_guide.pdf Last Updated: August 13, 2008 What’s New Changes since the last edition of this guide include: Modified support information for Dell 2900. See “Dell Server Support,” on page 7. Modified support information for Hitachi HA8000 TS20. See “Hitachi Server...

As it always happens, nothing is always perfect. But this year the job done has been amazing and the result is relevant. We will have to work really hard to make it better next year than this one. That is good news. The people related with the organization have done a good job and I only can thank them all for the effort.

Celebrating Akademy in the middle of europe (Mechelen, Belgium) has made possible that 350 people have came to the event. We expect 400 for next year, eventhough it will be in the Canary Islands (Gran Canaria). It seems that KDE is growing faster than it used to. Probably helps that KDE 4 is now a usable result in comparassion with last year, that was just a great idea in development. It is amazing that so many people have made agreements about desktop innovation and have respected the decisions taken eventhough the results are taking ...read more...

Photography has changed a lot since digital cameras broke into our lives and replaced film cameras. Camera makers have made great efforts to convince us that digital is better, and that new digital cameras are worth their money.

Unfortunately, this isn't completely true. Being so cheap, people shoot thousands of photos a day, careless of their quality. why care? they just want to capture something for their memories. The answer is: check your memories of akademy 2008. Do you actually remember your friends there as being greenish and pale? Well, that's what some of the photos looked like =)

So, after looking at the quality of pictures taken by people in Akademy 2008, and thanks to the suggestions of a few devels, I thought of writing a series of tutorials on how to fix your green friends... errrm... I mean your photos using KDE

So lets begin! KDE comes to the rescue!

In the following posts I aim at writing down some basic tutorials on how to fix your photos using ...read more...

Today, i have updated libkdcraw with last dcraw implementation from Dave Cofin. New pro camera are now supported as Nikon D700, Canon EOS 1000D, and Olympus E-520. So, digiKam is now able to play with these cameras as well.

However I was recently asked by Max what Gallium3D is and tried to fit it into a short and handy answer: Currently Mesa3D implements the specifications of the OpenGL API on Linux. Mesa3D has backends for each hardware driver type, so implementing parts of the API again and again for each driver. Gallium3D will now hop in by being the only backend Mesa3D needs to focus on. At the same time Gallium3D will also provide a ...read more...